1. Field Of The Invention
This invention relates to a method for rapidly predicting the physical and chemical properties of a complex hydrocarbon mixture using a combination of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.
2. Description Of The Related Art
Traditional wet chemistry methods for obtaining physical and chemical properties of a complex hydrocarbon mixture are very time consuming. Hydrocarbon mixtures typically contain many thousands of different chemical compounds so only bulk properties for classes of compounds are usually measured, e.g., distillation range, viscosity, pour point and the like.
Gas chromatography has been used to predict physical and performance properties of hydrocarbon mixtures boiling in the gasoline range. Crawford and Hellmuth, Fuel, 1990, 69, 443-447, describe the use of gas chromatography and principal components regression analysis to predict the octane values for gasolines blended from different refinery streams. Japanese laid-open patent application JP 03-100463 relates to a method of estimating the cetane number for fuel oils by separating an oil sample into its components using gas chromatograpy, measuring the signal strength of ion intensities at characteristic masses in the mass spectrum, and correlating these ion intensities to cetane number using multiple regression analysis.
Combined gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis has been done on crude oils. U.S. Pat. No. 5,119,315 discloses a method for aligning sample data such as a mass chromatogram with reference data from a known substance. Williams et al, 12th European Assoc. Organic Geochem., Organic Geochem. Int. Mtg. (Germany 09/16-20/85); Organic Geochemistry 1986, Vol. 10 (1-3) 451-461, discusses the biodegradation of crude oils as measured by GC/MS analysis.
It would be desirable to have a method for predicting properties of complex hydrocarbon mixtures using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry which method involves analyzing collinear data.